


The Woman in the Meadow

by seagog



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood, Coming of Age, Gen, Magical Realism, Original Character(s), Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:20:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25713451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seagog/pseuds/seagog
Summary: Eight-year-old Olivia stumbles upon a peculiar creature in a meadow of wildflowers.
Kudos: 1





	The Woman in the Meadow

Olivia’s world is laced with gold. It blooms in the cores of dandelions, dusts the trees like confectionary sugar, wafts down from the sky in soft rays. She runs through the wildflowers until her lungs verge on bursting and then collapses onto the ground, a trail of trampled foliage in her wake. There, she lies and watches unwoven clouds creep across her vision until she tires of the sight and clambers back onto her feet. Today, things are all hers for the taking.

While pacing through the meadow, she spots a small body curled in the undergrowth, lightly furred with coffee-colored splotches decorating its cream coat. Olivia kneels down for a closer look, bracing her hands against her knees, careful not to let a sound escape her lips.

She finds that there is no need. The thing unfurls and stares back at her, unflinching. It’s a funny-looking creature, so short and squat that its full height barely reaches Olivia’s stomach. It’s got a quivering pinkish nose and wide, glistening black eyes with an unnerving cleverness about them. A cupped ear on either side of its head, delicate skin curling inward. When it opens its mouth to speak, there is no noise, but Olivia can hear its singsong voice echoing inside her head.

“Would you like to come on an adventure?” it says.

“I’m already on one,” Olivia says with a shrug. “You can tag along if you’d like.”

The thing tilts its head, mulling over her offer.

Olivia steps closer and extends her hand. It hovers in the space between them, uncertain. “My family comes here all the time, but I’ve never seen you before. Do you live here?”

“I do. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“It is!” she agrees. “We live down in the city. I like it there, too. We have a big library, and a movie theater, and a playground—oh, and there are lots of palm trees, and all the roofs are painted red. But this place has the _prettiest_ flowers.” She twists a small purple blossom tucked behind her ear. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“My name?”

“Yeah. What should I call you?”

It blinks, long feathery lashes combing the air. “Whatever you like. The last one called me Tom.”

“Hmm.” She steps back and squints. Decides if she likes the feel of the name rolling along her tongue. “Tom. Yes. I will call you _Tom_.”

It’s hard to tell, but this seems to please Tom.

“Are you a boy or girl, Tom?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” says Tom. “What do you think I am?”

“ _Tom_ is a boy name.”

“Alright, then. I’m a boy,” he says. “What about you?”

“Silly,” Olivia giggles, and reaches out to tap Tom on the nose. It’s wet and cold and makes her giggle even harder. “I’m a girl. Obviously.” She motions down to her dress, the billowing skirt, the white fabric flecked with tiny red cherries. “My name is Olivia. I’m eight years old and my favorite color is green and I’m turning nine in November.”

“Nine!” Tom says. “That’s a very special age.”

“I know,” Olivia beams. “When I’m nine, I’ll go anywhere I want, and I’ll go to bed at ten o’ clock, and I’ll watch television after dinner with my mom and dad.”

“That all sounds very nice,” Tom agrees. “But isn’t it nice to be eight as well? I can’t remember the last time I was eight. It was a very, very long time ago. Please do refresh me.”

Settling in now, Olivia drops to the ground and crosses her legs, smoothing her skirt over them. She plucks a dandelion from the ground and pulls it apart tuft by tuft. “I don’t know,” she says. “There are a lot of things I can’t do while I’m eight. Nine will be better, see, but then ten is even more than nine. I can’t wait. It’s too long.” Olivia splits the green stem down the middle. “But eight is still fun. Like today,” she brightens, “I climbed the tree by the lake, and I did it so fast everyone got scared and mom stood under the branch to catch me if I fell.”

“Did you?”

“No. I got down just as fast. I’m strong,” she says, reaching for another unsuspecting flower, this one a bundle of pink lace, and uproots it with one swift pull. “And quick.”

From the far end of the field, a voice carries on the summer breeze. “Olivia! We’re going home. Hurry back now.”

“Coming, mom!” Olivia shouts before turning back to Tom and pouting. “I have to go now.”

“Will I see you again?” 

“Of course you will! We’ll be back soon.”

The girl reaches out and presses a hand to Tom’s head. It buzzes with warmth underneath the tender skin of her palm. Tom purrs in content.

“Next time, we can go an adventure together,” says Olivia.

“I would like that,” Tom agrees. He draws a circle in the soil with his right paw, then looks up at her, secretive. “Listen close,” he says. Olivia leans in. “There’s a woman in the meadow who’s turning into stone.”

Alarmed, Olivia swivels from side to side, but there’s no woman in peril, just flowers stretching in every direction as far as she can see. “Where? How? Was she cursed by an evil witch?” She drops her voice to a furtive whisper. “We have to go save her.”

“Oh, no rush,” Tom says, already turning and weaving his way into the wildflowers. Olivia blinks and he’s gone, all traces of cream and coffee fur vanished somewhere into the tall grass, but she can hear the last ringing echo of his voice in her ears: “You’ve got plenty of time.”

* * *

On the car ride home, Olivia hangs her head out of the window and lets her tongue loll over her lips. The wind tugs and tangles her black hair, whips her face until the blood rises to her cheeks, and leaves the inside of her mouth feeling like a dry sponge. It’s a good feeling, a fresh and new sensation. The colors and flavors of the day smudge across her mind in a wild finger painting: raspberries on her breakfast oatmeal, tart and sweet, a blue sky pounded with wind, white cotton-candy clouds torn along their stitching, minty-cool gum procured from a pocket inside Mom’s purse, tingling like ice with each inhale of breath. And Tom. She cannot figure Tom out and she does not mean to. She only knows that she will see him again, and that leaves her with a quiet smug satisfaction.

The week is long, as are the ones that come after it. For Olivia, weeks have always been long. Tom was right about that. It’s hard to conceive of a time when they won’t be. Still, it makes her anxious when Mom and Dad nap in the afternoon, sprawled limply on the couches like cuts of meat, letting the ripest hours of the day slip through their fingers. Her wealth of time has not made her any less careful to hold on to each and every precious grain.

It is another interminable afternoon when Mom and Dad call her over to the dining table. They sit together, hands linked, and explain to Olivia that they are moving into a new house in a new place with new neighbors.

“Why?” Olivia stares.

“Your dad got an offer from a big company. He has to move for his work,” says Mom, covering Olivia’s small hand with her own. “It’s not so far, only a long drive away. I know you like it here, sweetie, but…”

And this is how the conversation goes: “I know _…_ _but_ …”

Olivia nods until it becomes mechanical. She is eight now, not seven, not six, and she will _not_ cry. When Dad tells her that she’ll get to pack all her own things into a box to bring to their new house, she begins to draft a list in her head, her toys and crayons and shoes—and Tom. When she remembers Tom’s glittering black eyes, the tears spill over and she runs into her room, wiping furiously at her face with the backs of her arms. Mom’s footsteps are thudding down the hall after her, so she slams the door shut and turns the lock before burrowing herself underneath the sheets. No, no, no, no, this will not do at all.

With a blistering flush of anger, Olivia realizes that Tom has lied to her. She does not have plenty of time. She has none at all.

She blinks, and suddenly all her things are packed neatly into cardboard boxes, the boxes into the back of a truck, and the truck is pulling into the driveway of a stranger’s empty home. 

She dares to blink again, and now she is walking down the hall of her new school, listening to her shoes _tap-tap-tapping_ against the laminate floor. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling flatten all that she sees into an ugly, colorless etching. At lunch, she chooses a seat at the very back of the cafeteria and probes listlessly at her food, counting down the minutes until she can return to the welcome distraction of classwork. The faces around her are strange and full of smirks, the voices low and raspy with whispers.

The new house is not much better. It is tired, slow-moving, with crushed velvet skin stretched over its old bones. Olivia moves among the rooms as a shy ghost. She crawls underneath tables, lies flat on her back, and scribbles red-ink greetings onto the wood. _Hi. Hello. My name is Olivia and my favorite color is green. What is yours? This house belongs to us now but when you’re reading this it will belong to you. Do you like it very much? I am still deciding but right now I don’t think I do. I am sorry if that makes you upset. I wish things could stay the same way forever. What do you think?_ Reaching forward or back, she doesn’t know.

There are many ways to fill the time between the peeling walls, and Olivia is determined to discover them all. She paces the halls and catalogues the number of windows. She hides behind the drapes, pulling them around herself like a blanket, and imagines that she is hiding from a great shadowy beast stalking past each door, nosing the ground to catch her scent.

Once the danger is past, she builds herself a fortress on the living room carpet and maps out her empire behind the security of four couch cushions. Surrounded by her royal council and her most trusted advisor, Rosie the Bear, she details her plans to conquer the Kitchen Kingdom and annex the Dining Room to her territories. When she soon tires of ruling over the kingdom, she tugs on her boots and wanders out the back door, on the prowl for new sights and sounds.

There is not much to be found. The backyard is old and withered, but not even the threatening kind of withered, and Olivia feels cheated of gnarled graveyard trees and thorny hedges. The grass is chalky yellow, sapped of moisture, and the other plants aren’t faring much better. She pulls the leaves off dead tomato plants and crushes them to fine powder in her hands. Wildflowers do not thrive in the black soil.

* * *

Today will be a good day. Today, they are driving to their old town for a weekend visit. Olivia bounces in her seat the entire way there, nibbling on candy bars and reaching out of the window to ride the wind with her hand.

When they reach their old house, Olivia clambers out of the car and stands on the curb, observing from a distance. She counts the differences on her fingers. There’s a fresh coat of paint on the porch, a new line of rosebushes planted between the palms. The mailbox post, which used to be crooked, now stands at a perfect right angle from the ground. A small change, yet somehow glaring. Olivia stares up at the window of what used to be her bedroom, wondering if another child has taken her place. She fiddles nervously with a piece of hair before forcing her hands into her pockets.

After the house, they drive down to the meadow and park their car under the shade of a large tree. Olivia is relieved to see that this place, at least, has been untouched by human interference; if anything, the flowers have grown denser and more untamed since their last trip. While Mom and Dad set up a picnic for lunch, spreading out brown-paper-bagged sandwiches and thermoses of lemonade on a striped quilt, Olivia wanders towards the other end of the meadow, plucking the finest daisies as she walks and stringing them together into a chain.

It does not take long before she finds Tom, sitting on a tree stump and etching pictures into the wood with the dark juice of crushed berries.

“Hello,” Tom says, glancing up as she approaches. “Oh, it’s you. I’ve missed you so very much, Olivia!”

“Oh, Tom,” Olivia sniffs. She bends down to examine his work. Broad strokes come together to form a scattering of noses, eyes, lips, faces. “A lot’s changed since the last time we met. You’ve changed.”

“Have I?”

Olivia narrows her eyes. There is something different, but she can’t explain what it is. Perhaps the eyes are smaller, or the ears are longer, or the coffee-colored splashes on his coat have darkened just a hint.

“Yes,” she decides. “But at least this meadow is just the same as it was.”

“Are you still eight?” Tom scales her arm and settles in the crook where her shoulder meets her neck. “You look taller.”

“I’m turning ten in a week.”

“Is it better than eight?”

“I don’t know.” Olivia slumps her head into her hands. “I feel the same, but everything else keeps moving.”

“I think I know what you mean,” chirps Tom.

“You do?”

Tom looks up at her ruefully. “Oh, yes. Everyone forgets me sooner or later. But I still remember them. Each and every face. Sometimes I lose their names, but never their faces.”

“I won’t forget you,” Olivia says, suddenly fierce. “I don’t forget anything.”

“Oh, you will. It happens to everyone.” When Olivia glares at him, prickling with heat, Tom leaps down from her shoulder and settles at her feet. “Don’t be angry, now.”

“I’m not angry,” she hisses.

“I can show you.”

“Show me?”

“Yes. Put your hand on the top of my head, and close your eyes.”

Olivia does so. As with the first time, she feels heat throbbing just below the thin covering of fur, but when she closes her eyes, the sensation intensifies into a miniature sun spinning under her palm, a heady burn flickering yellow. “What’s happening?”

“I’m showing you their faces,” comes Tom’s reply. His voice seems to come from the innermost chambers of her mind.

The fire glows brighter, and all at once Olivia cannot feel Tom’s fur or delicate skull underneath her fingers, only the thrum of heat jumping up her veins. An itch prickles at her eyelids, but she keeps them scrunched closed. Inch by inch, the inferno consumes her whole, yet she feels merely as if she has been lying underneath the sun for an hour too long, crossing the periphery where pleasant warmth tips into the sting of sunburn. She feels every muscle slackening, an unfurling taking place from the inside out.

Without warning, she is no longer Olivia; she does not know her name, only that she is another girl from another time, this one with heavy soccer cleats on her feet and two ginger braids swish-swinging down her back as she runs. She sees another Mom and Dad, their faces alternately strange and familiar to her eyes; another home, where the girl she once was slid down the banisters and threw grass-stained shirts into an overflowing hamper. Then she is a boy, mud soiling his white shirt as he shapes dirt into mounds and mounds into castles. Another set of parents, a dog with thick shaggy fur and a slobbering mouth, a bedroom with star stickers splashed across the ceiling and comic books strewn across the floor. The girls and boys swirl past in a dreamlike procession, one after the other, bringing with them parades of mothers and fathers, bicycles and kittens, warm beds and scraped knees.

The heat is suddenly painful, and Olivia yanks her hand away from Tom’s head and stumbles backward, gripping her wrist. The connection breaks off in an instant, and to Olivia it feels like falling headfirst into a tub of ice water. She gasps for breath and wraps her arms around her shivering torso, the sudden emptiness almost unbearable. The urge to cry is suffocating. It swells inside her like a siren on mute.

Through the unshed tears, she can see Tom blinking up at her with sad eyes. He nuzzles against her side. “I’m sorry,” he says, so earnest that it hurts to hear. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You’ll forget the whole thing one day, if it’s any consolation.”

“They all forgot you?”

“Every last one.”

“I don’t want to,” says Olivia. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember that I told you? There’s a woman in the meadow,” Tom echoes, sad and subdued. “She’s turning to stone. Maybe you can find a way, Olivia.”

* * *

“Olive, sweetie,” says Mom, and she’s using the nickname that she reserves for, as dad would put it, _breaking the bad news._ “Honey, come sit down.”

“Okay,” Olivia says, warily, tucking her feet underneath her on the couch.

Mom twists her wedding band round and round, a spinning carousel of gold. This carousel is what Olivia will focus on for the duration of their talk.

“Your dad and I have been having some trouble,” she says.

Olivia does not blink.

“Your dad and I have been having some trouble,” Mom repeats, this time with a little more force behind her voice, “and we thought that you should know…”

The carousel spins faster.

Afterwards, Olivia goes down into the garden and runs her fingers along every surface, but nothing holds her attention for long. She is twelve and the world is not simple. The weeks are winding down. She can feel it. At night she lies wide awake, watching the ceiling in fear that she will lose the hours if she sleeps, and in the morning she rises in a restless haze. “I think I’ll take you up on that adventure now, Tom,” she says to an empty room.

Tom does not materialize. Olivia realizes that she did not expect him to. After that day, she thinks less and less of the old meadow with the wildflowers. It’s harder to reach, receding as fast as the present seems to be moving. She will make time to remember, she reassures herself. Just not now.

The day that Dad moves out, he hugs her tight, picking her up and swinging her through the air the way he hasn’t done since she was little. He promises that they will see each other every other weekend. She nods mutely and closes the door between them, refusing to watch his car pull out of the driveway and shrink into nothing as it races down the road.

Olivia straightens and squares her jaw. She will _not_ linger on this terrible feeling in her stomach, nor any other sensation that chews her nerves raw and leaves her shaky and worn. Perhaps it is better to not linger on any sensation at all. Suddenly she is tired, so very tired, and she wants nothing more than to curl underneath her warm, heavy blanket and let its weight bear down on her until she is sunken away from the world altogether.

In the hours between her bouts of slumber, Olivia finds no shortage of things to occupy her thoughts: her new friends from school, the homework to be finished before the weekend is over, what she wants for her birthday. The diversions are endless and interchangeable, and for that she is grateful. Each day seems to be a fraction easier than the last, a fraction more similar to the one that came before it. The act of waking up becomes a pain, but she is soothed by the knowledge that at the end of the day, she will return to sleep, return to darkness.

Soon it is her thirteenth birthday, and it tastes of frosting and fizzy soda. Her fourteenth: angel food cake, fresh strawberries ripe to bursting. Her fifteenth, dark chocolate, sweet at first bite but with a bitterness underneath. Her sixteenth she does not remember.

* * *

Years and years later the woman would come by the field of wildflowers once more on a chance encounter. It was surprisingly intact, yet there was the queer feeling of stopped time presiding over the field, as if you stepped inside you, too, would be frozen with the dandelions and aster and the deep blue-hearted starbursts she did not know the name of (once she had known—once she had looked up its name in a thick library book full of useless things like that, the names and families of flowers, and isn’t _that_ a funny picture, a flower with a family?).

Time was not something Olivia could afford to lose. She could feel it slipping away from her often now, a ticklish unpleasantness at the back of her neck. Always something that must be attended to. Something to be bought, something to be cleaned, something to be thrown out, the spaces between the _somethings_ growing shorter all the while. She looked over the vast field — it seemed larger to her now than it had once been — and felt frozen where she stood.

She would have stayed like that for a long time if another _something_ had not compelled her forward. She walked into the field, arms stiff at her sides, moving slowly and with an unvoiced purpose. Her steps were high and deliberate, careful not to trample the flowers. It was a long time before she reached the end of the field.

At the root of an old tree stump, she found a sleeping animal curled in the grass. It was a slight creature, its ribcage visible through its skin and the knobs of its spine arching underneath its cream-and-coffee colored coat. Olivia bent down and saw that it was merely a cat, an old one, too, with little white furs proliferating between its ears and along its nose. Its eyes were closed and a deep purr emanated from its chest as it soaked up the day’s sun. A strange twinge of disappointment pierced through Olivia.

She straightened and prepared to leave, but her eyes remained fixed on the cat. There was a terrible frustration racing through her now. She had forgotten something—forgotten _what?_ Some silly idea conjured during her childhood? There had been endless summer days spent playing in this meadow, she recalled that much. Ridiculous that she was still holding on to it all this time later.

Olivia turned around and took three steps before marching right back to the same spot. She cursed herself. If only she could _remember_. But what was it? What had she lost?

At her feet, the cat roused himself from his sleep and stretched, slow and luxuriant. His eyes were black as tar and it sent a tiny shock down her spine to look into them.

“Hello, Olivia,” said Tom.


End file.
